Do you have better things to do than scour the internet for news? No problem! If you need to know what's important for the developer, IProgrammer Weekly puts the unmissable bits together in a handy digest.

Kay Ewbank awarded a rating of 4.5 to a slim book that aims to explain cloud computing in terms of how we got to where we are now, what options are available at the moment, and how things are likely to develop in the future.

This second volume in the planned series "The Theoretical Minimum" was given a top 5-star rating by Mike James for those who are either students of quantum mechanics or just curious to know about it:Highly recommended as long as you can cope with the math.

News

Firefox 58 has just been released to end users, but it has some interesting changes for programmers as well Mozilla really does seem to be bringing Firefox into the 21st century, leaving its legacy architectural, XUL and XCOM well behind while completely re-engineering the browser.

Donald Knuth, author of the classic The Art of Computer Programming, has celebrated his 80th birthday and is still working on improving his monumental work. He's also still hoping people will check out the hard exercises of TAOCP to make sure they're correct.

The way big companies are open sourcing significant AI is both gratifying and slightly worrying. AI is the biggest revolution since we discovered fire and started making tools. FaceBook AI Research has added to the list of what is available by open sourcing its Detectron project.

The Alliance for Open Media's work on an alternative video codec is making progress with tests in a trial version of Firefox showing that the Alliance's AV1 video compression technology produces video files that are a third smaller than those compressed by rival options.

The 10th Edition of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category goes to Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, Ronald Rivest and Adi Shamir for their “fundamental contributions to modern cryptology, an area of a tremendous impact on our everyday life.”

Registration has opened for Hash Code 2018, Google's team programming competition for students and professionals in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. This is the fifth edition of Hash Code which has grown from 200 participants in 2014 to last year's figure of 26,000 developers.

Software Developer has the distinction of coming top not only as Best Technology Job and Best STEM Job in the U.S. News ranking, but also as the best job overall for 2018. CNNMoney which also compiles a list of the 100 best jobs, placed Mobile Developer in the top position for 2017.

Neural Networks do seem to be able to keep on impressing us with their ability to do different tasks better than we thought possible. The latest in a trio of networks from Microsoft has the ability to draw what you describe.

UPDATE Apple bowed to concerted pressure and the Wehe App has been approved by Apple and is now available in the App Store. Initially the app, which tests to see if your ISP is applying throttling to your data according to its type - aka a net neutrality detector - was been rejected from the App Store for some very strange reasons.

A new survey of Trends in Web Technologies confirms that web technology is now the backbone of application development for most companies and reveals that data visualization is one of the most important capabilities in web application development.

There's a new version of Hip Hop Virtual Machine, an open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in Hack and PHP. HHVM was originally developed at Facebook to provide a way to convert PHP script to C++ so it could be compiled and run on web servers.

MIT has made an intensive short course on the practice of deep learning freely available to all - both in person on campus and online. It even has a course t-shirt, but hurry to claim one as the offer ends in three days.

The Core

Functions are objects, but we tend to forget that they are. Just like all objects in JavaScript, functions are anonymous and unlike other languages don't have immutable names. This isn't a huge problem,. but how can you write a Function that references its own properties without a fixed name? We need the self reference pattern.

Babbage's Bag

Finite state machines may sound like a very dry and boring topic but they reveal a lot about the power of different types of computing machine. Every Turing machine includes a finite state machine so there is a sense in which they come first. They also turn out to be very useful in practice.